After an evening of real­ly great con­ver­sa­tion yes­ter­day, I popped back in to my room and start­ed to orga­nize the some of the tools and equip­ment that my dear friend Ash­ley was kind enough to ship to me. I’ve been enjoy­ing the small leather projects I’ve been doing, but I’m look­ing for­ward to build­ing some big­ger and more com­plex cre­ations.

I’ve been hav­ing trou­ble locat­ing my sewing nee­dles in the tool bag though, so I made this nee­dle pouch with a cou­ple of pieces of scrap leather. I’ve spaced and punched all of these holes by hand, and I’m real­ly hap­py with how con­sis­tent the stitch­ing turned out. (ignore the extra holes on the left side, that was just left­over from some­thing else and I wasn’t con­cerned about includ­ing it in some­thing so util­i­tar­i­an!) Rather than hav­ing to stitch more ver­ti­cal lines to tight­en up the pock­et, I applied a light coat of rub­ber cement inside the pouch and then pushed the nee­dles and awl tips in and cre­ates a secure stor­age spot to keep them togeth­er.

I also built that D-Ring strap which will be used in a lat­er project to secure the ring. The sim­i­lar­ly shaped piece of leather in the back­ground was, err, prac­tice. :)

hand stitched nee­dle pouch made from scrap leather

Also, a lit­tle bonus for you. I man­aged to mis­place the cam­era for a few days, but here are a few shots of my dri­ve in from Ottawa through the real­ly love­ly Que­bec coun­try­side. The day was a bit grey, but the road along the St. Lawrence riv­er was real­ly enjoy­able. The scale of the infra­struc­ture projects out here is only matched by the scale of the nat­ur­al fea­tures they’re har­ness­ing. this riv­er is huge, and the dam that plugs it demands a lock to allow boat­ing traf­fic access to both sides.

A lock and hydro­elec­tric dam on the St. Lawrence Riv­er

A lock and hydro­elec­tric dam on the St. Lawrence Riv­er

The area is filled with beau­ti­ful old church­es too

Church in South­ern Que­bec

Out of curios­i­ty, I stopped at a ceme­tery along the way. Not sure what I was expect­ing, I was sur­prised by the large num­ber of Eng­lish, Scot­tish, and even Ger­man names fea­tured on the stones.

Mary Gra­ham — Head­stone at a ceme­tery in South­ern Que­bec

Ross, McPhee, and Nichols — Head­stone at a ceme­tery in South­ern Que­bec